about: the letter
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about: the letter
G is the seventh letter in the Latin alphabet. Its name in English ( ) is spelled gee.
History
The letter G was introduced in the Old Latin period as a variant of C to distinguish Latin voiced velar /ɡ/ from voiceless /k/. The recorded originator of the letter G is freedman Spurius Carvilius Ruga, the first Roman to open a fee-paying school, who taught around 230 BC. At this time, K had fallen out of favour, and C, which had formerly expressed both /ɡ/ and /k/ before open vowels, had come to express /k/ in all environments.
Ruga's positioning of G shows that alphabetic order, related to the letters' values as Greek numerals, was a concern even in the 3rd century BC. Sampson (1985) suggested that: "Evidently the order of the alphabet was felt to be such a concrete thing that a new letter could be added in the middle only if a ‘space' was created by the dropping of an old letter." According to some records, the original seventh letter, Z, had been purged from the Latin alphabet somewhat earlier in the 3rd century BC by the Roman censor Appius Claudius, who found it distasteful and foreign.
Eventually, both velar consonants /k/ and /ɡ/ developed palatalizations and allophones before front vowels, which is why today, C and G have different sound values in the various Romance languages, as well as English (because of French influence).
Typographic forms
The modern lower case G has two typographic variants: the single-story (sometimes opentail) G " because the tail was effectively shorter, making it possible to put more lines on a page. In the double-story version, a small stroke in the upper-right, often terminating in an orb shape, is called an "earish".
Generally, the two minuscule forms are interchangeable, but occasionally the difference has been exploited to make a contrast. The 1949 Principles of the International Phonetic Association recommends using acknowledged as an acceptable variant.
Usage
In English, the letter represents a voiced postalveolar affricate /dʒ/) ("soft G"), as in: giant, ginger, and geology; or a voiced velar plosive /ɡ/ ("hard G"), as in: goose, gargoyle, and game. In some words of French origin, the "soft G" is pronounced as a fricative (/ʒ/), as in rouge, beige, and genre. Generally, G is soft before E, I, and Y, and hard otherwise, but there are many English words of non-Romance origin where G is soft or hard regardless of position (e.g. "get"), and two (gaol, margarine) in which it is soft even before an A.
Languages which are neither Romance nor Germanic in origin typically use G to represent /ɡ/ regardless of position (however, the Dutch language does not have /ɡ/ in its native words, and instead G is pronounced as a voiced velar fricative /ɣ/, a sound that does not occur in modern English). German, however, is notable for its sparse use of G for a "soft G" sound within the language (to represent the sounds /ʒ/, or /dʒ/, or the voiceless postalveolar fricative /ʃ/) regardless of its position within German words. While the soft value of G varies in different Romance languages (/ʒ/ in French, Catalan, and Portuguese, /d͡ʒ/ in Italian and Romanian, and /x/ in Castilian Spanish and /h/ in other dialects of Spanish), in all except Romanian and Italian, soft G is pronounced the same as the J of the same Romance language.
